Spain’s Socialist government is creating a “blacklist” of doctors who refuse to perform abortions, in a controversial bid to silence conscientious objection.
The prime minister’s office has formally asked regional governments to compile lists of doctors who refuse to participate in pregnancy terminations. Legal experts and doctors argue the plan violates basic rights and marks a new step in the ideological push to make abortion not just legal, but mandatory across Spain’s public healthcare system.
The move comes days after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced his intention to enshrine so-called abortion rights in Spain’s Constitution, mirroring France. Sánchez called it a defense of “women’s freedom and autonomy,” but opponents say it is really about suppressing dissent and enforcing his government’s ideology.
“This is difficult to see as anything other than an attempt to restrict freedom of conscience,” Manuel Martínez-Sellés, president of the Madrid College of Physicians, told El Debate. He warned that the so-called “objector lists” would inevitably be used “to discriminate against doctors who refuse to take part in acts they consider morally wrong.”
In regions such as Madrid and Castile and León—where a majority of gynecologists are conscientious objectors—the central government has accused hospitals of “non-compliance” with abortion law. Yet medical professionals insist that conscientious objection is protected under both the Spanish Constitution and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. “If the government wants to organize abortion services,” Martínez-Sellés said, “it should ask for a list of those willing to perform them—not those who refuse.”
For many observers, the campaign against objectors is less about healthcare and more about politics. “It’s a diversion from the government’s internal scandals—corruption, division within the Socialist Party, and Sánchez’s personal decline,” Martínez-Sellés added. The pattern, he noted, is familiar: when under pressure, the government reignites emotional debates over abortion, feminism, or its campaign to rewrite Spain’s Civil War and Franco-era history to rally its base.
In the past year, Sánchez’s cabinet has launched a taxpayer-funded website to promote abortion, dismissed post-abortion trauma as a “myth,” and now seeks to criminalize medical dissent.
Observers warn that conscientious objection is not a loophole but a cornerstone of democratic freedom. If the government can catalog and penalize citizens for exercising that right, they argue, no domain of personal liberty will remain untouched.
What’s at stake, they say, is not merely the abortion debate—but the freedom to think, believe, and act according to one’s conscience.
